Word: subways
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ripple in the current wave of terror beneath New York's streets. Nobody is sure exactly how many people have been robbed and beaten in recent months by teen-age gangs, often while fellow passengers and even train conductors did nothing. Already this year there have been eight subway murders. On one particularly bad night two token-booth operators in Queens were burned to death after some teen-agers poured gasoline through the change window and set it afire...
...situation got so bad that in March Mayor Edward Koch sent additional police underground to patrol subway trains between 6 p.m. and 2 a.m. But the Magnificent 13 took up its underground patrols well before the mayor acted. The group's founder and leader is Curtis ("The Rock") Sliwa, 23, a night manager of the McDonald's restaurant at the corner of Broadway and 236th Street in The Bronx. Neatly turned out and ruggedly handsome, Sliwa became known as The Rock for his high school skill at brawling and an ability to go for days without sleep...
...Charles Bronson in Death Wish-because somebody in their family has been attacked." Recruits are first tested for reflexes and ability to go without sleep, then for tolerance of verbal abuse, as Sliwa calls them "nigger" or "spik," the least of the taunts they may get in the subway. Nearly every volunteer has been excited by The Warriors, a film in which street gangs plot to take over New York. Among the fired-up who have been accepted are ten whites, six blacks, twelve Hispanics and, just lately, 20 Chinese-after the Magnificent 13 was written up in Chinese newspapers...
...Berets very seriously, partly because they distrust vigilantes and have come to feel that active help from "civilians" is more trouble than it is worth. But Sliwa intends to continue the patrols. "It didn't take the muggers long to change their schedule," he notes. Six major subway thefts with violence have lately been committed after special police patrols knocked off work at 2 a.m. Fortnight ago, as Sliwa and two other Red Berets drove off six men trying to rape a woman on a Brooklyn elevated platform, Sliwa disarmed a man with a sawed-off shotgun by using...
...built on a grand scale, where everything seems keyed to the country's heroic selfesteem. Broad avenues and vistas sweep toward tall monuments that honor the struggle for liberation and pay homage to President Kim Il Sung, whose name and image are everywhere. Even the stations of the subway system, which rivals Moscow's, have such exhortative names as "Rehabilitation" and "National Building" and bear huge frescoes of the President...